Anish Kapoor Bought Exclusive Artistic Rights to the Blackest Black, So Stuart Semple Made the Pinkest Pink

Vantablack — short for "vertically aligned nanotube array black" — was developed at the UK's National Physical Laboratory and unveiled by Surrey NanoSystems in July 2014. It is a forest of carbon nanotubes grown perpendicular to a substrate, dense enough that almost no photon striking it bounces back out. The laboratory measurement is 99.965 percent absorption of perpendicular visible light, which gives surfaces coated with it the visual character of holes punched in space.

In February 2016, Surrey NanoSystems made an unusual deal: they granted the British sculptor Anish Kapoor sole artistic license to the Vantablack S-VIS variant. He could use it; no other artist could. The art world responded poorly. Stuart Semple, an artist in Bournemouth, designed and sold a fluorescent fuchsia called the Pinkest Pink and placed an order page online with the explicit term that anyone in the world could buy it except Anish Kapoor. By signing the checkout box you affirmed, on penalty of nothing, that you were not Kapoor and that the pigment would not, to the best of your knowledge, end up in his hands. Kapoor obtained a pot anyway and posted an Instagram of himself raising a single middle finger dipped in pink. Semple released the Blackest Black 1.0 and several follow-up pigments aimed at the rest of the art world.

Vantablack itself has a darker stablemate: in 2019, MIT engineers building a different carbon-nanotube coating for solar applications accidentally produced one that absorbed at 99.995%. They covered a $2 million yellow diamond with it for an exhibition at the New York Stock Exchange.